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DOI:
10.1215/00295132-6846066
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Citation for published version (APA):
Elliott, J. (2018). The Microeconomic Mode: Survival Games, Life-Interest and the Re-imagination of Sovereignty
. Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 51(2), 210-225. https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-6846066
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Download date: 10. Aug. 2022
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Jane Elliott
August 31, 2016
***FORTHCOMING FROM NOVEL**
AUTHOR’S FINAL ACCEPTED MS
The Microeconomic Mode: Survival Games, Life-Interest and the Re-imagination of
Sovereignty
Since the late 1990s in North America and Britain, the field of contemporary aesthetics
has been marked by the appearance and growing prevalence of what I call the microeconomic
mode. This mode has proliferated across media and genres as well as the demarcations between
high and low culture; it gives form to some of the most celebrated recent literary novels as well
as some of the most reviled products of popular culture. Texts is this mode are characterized by
a combination of abstraction and extremity, a fusion that we can witness everywhere from the
Saw horror-film series (2004-10) to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2007), from the reality TV
franchise Survivor (1997 to the present) to Steve McQueen’s art-house film Hunger (2008).
Abstraction results from a focus on delimited or capsule worlds in which option and decision,
action and effect, have been extracted from everyday contexts and thus made unusually
legible—for example, the life raft, the desert island, the medical experiment, the prison cell.
Extremity registers in forms of painful, grotesque or endangered embodiment, including
deprivation, torture, mutilation, self-mutilation and various threats to life itself. The
combination of the two results in situations in which individuals make agonized choices among
unwelcome options, options that present intense physical or life-threatening consequences for
themselves or their loved ones. In its fullest manifestations, the aesthetic effect of this mode is
brutal, in every sense of the word: crude, harsh, ruthless, unrelenting, and unpleasantly precise.
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In order to suggest what this mode looks like in operation, I want to begin with a
particularly stark and telling example: the film 127 Hours (2011), based on the memoir titled A
Rock and a Hard Place (2004) by rock climber Aron Ralston. Aron, played by James Franco,
becomes trapped in a slot canyon when his arm is wedged between a falling boulder and the
canyon wall; eventually, after nearly dying from exposure and deprivation, he cuts off his arm
in order to escape the canyon and find help. Some of Aron’s personal history appears in
flashbacks, but it isn’t presented as qualifying or shaping the life-or-death choice that confronts
him. The few elements with causal significance in the canyon—the trapped arm, the lack of
food and water, the number of hours—concern Aron’s sheer existence as a conscious mind that
inhabits a body with certain essential needs and capacities. It is difficult to imagine any human
being with this sort of body experiencing Aron’s situation very differently, whatever the
specifics of his or her personal psychology or place in the social order. Not only does Aron’s
decision to cut off his arm appear detached from any external processes that would render it
something more than an expression of sheer individual choice, but the horrible nature of the
act simultaneously throws into relief the fierce determination with which his choice is enacted.
I refer to this experience of highly consequential, utterly willed and fearsomely undesired
action as suffering agency.
In animating interest in this way, I argue, works such as 127 Hours offer searing
incarnation of the microeconomic model of human behaviour. Often described via Lionel
Robbins’ now canonical description of economics as “the science which studies human
behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses,” this
model combines methodological individualism and the foreclosure of interpersonal utility
comparison with the presumption that the choosing individual operates according to the
parameters of allocative choice, weak rationality, and utility maximization (Robbins 15).
1
There
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are significant disputes regarding the meaning and parameters of each of these terms even
among contemporary orthodox economists, but these differences have not invalidated this
approach so much as given shape to various schools and approaches within mainstream
economics as a discipline.
2
In practice, microeconomics relies on this axiomatic foundation to
produce elaborate mathematic descriptions for the aggregate phenomena guided by consumer
behaviour—for example, demand curves or price points. My focus instead is on the designation
of agential allocative choice as an, which emerges most visibly via the granularity of
microeconomics as a sub-discipline even as functions as an unquestioned and unquestionable
foundation for the discipline as a whole.
3
We can get a sense of the conceptual power of this model by turning to the work of
Chicago-School economist Gary Becker. Because of its movement into areas normally
associated with sociology, his work represents a methodologically radical edge of
microeconomics, but it is for this reason that his approach is especially revealing. When he
applies the microeconomic view of choice “relentlessly and unflinchingly” to areas formerly
consigned to other disciplines, Becker distils what he calls “the economic approach to human
behaviour” from its usual content and makes its self-reinforcing nature apparent (Becker 5, 1).
For Becker, what makes the economic understanding of human behaviour unique is precisely
its universality: not only is there is no act of human choice to which the model cannot be said
to apply, but also the model renders every choice by definition equally rational and allocative.
4
Becker’s overarching methodology depends on aggregate presumptions of market efficiency and
equilibrium, but his description of the individual as a “decision unit” functions without
reference to such aggregate factors. Instead, it emerges from the tautologies that make up the
model alone (167, 7). Because allocative choice necessarily takes place in conditions of scarcity,
resources distributed in one area are necessarily not available for distribution in another. In
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effect, that is, every benefit comes with a cost, and vice versa. Add to that closed system the
definition of choice as the expression of individual preference, and any choice that at first
glance appears irrationally costly can be understood to meet preferences that are not
immediately apparent. If an individual choice does not yet appear to us to maximize utility,
then that is only because we have not yet identified the evaluation of cost and benefit, means
and end, that guided the choice in question.
When combined with methodological individualism, this tautological account
transforms every human action into an expression of individual agency.
5
Not only does
methodological individualism strip out contextual factors that might determine or mitigate
individual choice, but also the factors that do remain in play become transposed into the
closed system of costs and benefits. In this way, the very existence of constraints becomes the
vehicle through which we enact our capacity to act in our own best interests. For example, in
his analysis of life expectancy, Becker posits that every death must be considered in some sense
a suicide, since it “could have been postponed if more resources had been invested [by the
subject] in prolonging life” (10). Even seemingly self-destructive behaviour becomes the logical
result of the pursuit of some goal other than that of prolonging life. And once the existence of
that goal is taken as proven by the presumption that it was chosen, the choice can retroactively
be determined to be an expression of interest since it lead to this end. By foreclosing the
importance of any contextual factor that does not function as either a resource to be
distributed or an end to be met, this model turns even the negotiation of profound
constraints—for instance, the finitude of life itself—into the rational enactment of sheer
individual will. In this model, taking action in one’s own best interest is not a measure of true
liberty or full personhood but rather an inescapable feature of human life itself.